H 23°, L 4° | Tomorrow: 
H 21°, L 6°It has been more than three and a half years since the United States invaded Iraq, and growing American opposition has taken to blaming President Bush and Congress for the "failure" of this war.
However, before this dissent affects the outcome of the Nov. 7 elections, Americans desperately need to re-evaluate where to place this blame.
Before we scapegoat President Bush for the failure of Iraq, it might be helpful to be aware of American expectations of the Iraq War, lest we forget that it was the American public who not only supported this war but did so by an astonishingly large majority.
Prior to the invasion in March 2003, 62 percent of Americans supported the war, but since then, the numbers have effectively flip-flopped as 61 percent of Americans now oppose the war. How could Americans go from being so supportive to so against the war in such short order?
Many are quick to point to the failures of the Bush Administration to establish self-rule and security in Iraq. However, these failures are less the work of an incompetent president and more the embodiment of the unrealistic expectations of the average attention deficient American.
If history is to be our guide for reasonable expectations, then we can look to the examples of democratic development elsewhere, including the United States.
In the United States, it took several years before Americans understood and established democracy in a meaningful fashion. Many colonial states did not agree with the original forms of the constitution and bitterly dissented among each other until establishing a form of a consensus that was as weak as the union itself.
Similar to the situation in Iraq, the British Raj took 200 years to establish democracy in India. Only now have Indians taken steps towards a meaningful democracy, but even this success is bittersweet; riddled with procedural failures, court backlogs, and an inconsistent understanding of equality according to common law standards.
In more recent examples, one need not look further than the endless failures of legal development plans in South America, Africa and, yes, the Middle East. Countless countries fell under the curtain of U.S. and Soviet developmentalists, and the result was no surprise: countless failures.
Rather than referencing these cases of thorny development, American development romantics point to the Marshall Plan as the model of economic and legal development. The reality is that the Marshall Plan spoiled Americans, deluding them into believing that legal and economic development could happen anywhere.
It is no surprise that a country like Germany would develop democracy quickly, since it had it prior to World War II, but in a country like Iraq, we're fooling ourselves.
In Iraq, a country with virtually no history of democracy, secular law, market institutions and freedom from oppression, it's impossible to believe that they "figure it out" in three years.
However, Americans decidedly ignored history when they chose to back this war believing that Americans would be in and out before you could say "Saddam."
If Americans cannot make rational decisions based upon history, then how can we really expect the same of our leaders?
The truth is that we can't. Americans somehow don't realize that war takes time, democracy doesn't happen over night and that any invasion will cost more than lives.
This foolishness makes their initial support of war all the more dangerous. Our cavalier approach toward war is failing our safety, ironically one of the primary reasons we went into Iraq.
The re-evaluation of our expectations of war, and more generally our elected officials, is something of which we are desperately in need. Expecting immediate results from anything is if nothing else an indictment against our attention span.
Legal development can yield great results, but in order to do it, a great amount of effort must be put forth, something that we haven't even come close to realizing.
If we are to believe that war is somehow a magical potion to solve the world's problems, then we had better be ready for the side effects. Because before we can blame the president for his "stay-the-course" rhetoric, we must blame ourselves for allowing him to take that course in the first place.
Robert Phansalkar ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in languages and cultures of Asia and political science.
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Yo. You are a student @ UW-Madison. Write about issues around here. This is the type of stuff that is kind of irrelevent on a college paper.
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Mr. Phansalkar, do you not remember that we were sold this war with false expectations? If Bush was realistic at the beginning,we would have not supported his decision.
We’ll be greeted at liberators; oil money will fund rebuilding; dammit, don’t you remember the “mission accomplished” sign? OK, the last one was after the fact, but it shows that we’re still be lead on with false hope.
Americans need answers. I want to see some generals and cabinet members testify under oath. Support your troops by questioning their leadership. Wouldn’t you question a basketball coach who plays Shaquille O’Neil in the point guard position? Same thing.
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The author flings the word “failure” 7x— as if this assumption were a foregone conclusion. There are, of course, many reasons why Americans should focus our successes in Iraq. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/15/AR2006011500417_pf.html
Moreover, leaving readers guessing about alternative strategies is a pathetic way of hiding the weakness of the underlying argument. Appeasement is not a viable alternative. And blaming America first is an overly gnawed little chestnut.
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“It is no surprise that a country like Germany would develop democracy quickly…”
So maybe we can bring the troops home now? And what about Japan? They STILL have an emperor and certainly no democratic tradition before WW II.
I am starting to beleive that isolationism is the way to go - the USA could get along without the rest of the world just fine. Protect our borders and start building pebble-bed nukes to replace ALL inported energy.
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Even if we acheive “success” in Iraq, we still aren’t any safer than if we fail. Even if Iraq is turned into New Texas, we are still not any safer than when we began.
The “we’ll fight them over there, so we don’t have to fight them here” arguement doesn’t hold water anymore; we’re fighting for neither side of a civil war. Is an Iraqi civil war going to all of the sudden break out in Manhattan? That’s the war we’re fighting “over there.”
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Well said, Rob. Democracy took centuries to develop. I see no way a society like Iraq can be expected to develop a meaningful democratic society in three short years.
However, this does not explain the incredible violence that one of your fellow writers, Gerald, alluded to a few weeks ago
Why are Iraqis so intent on killing one another?
However, I agree that we, the American public, though fooled by an eager administration, were rather foolish in our own eagerness to invade a country that had nothing to do with our War on Terror.
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If you want respect for your opinion then you need to be totally honest. Spin is not going to accomplish anything.
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There must be a solution somewhere between cut-and-run and stay-the-course. Obviously, President Bush has tried several preparations for this war on terror (A-G), but has fallen short thus far. On the whole, Preparation H feels good and has the best chance to reduce the inflammatory conditions we have been experiencing.
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If you listened to any of the speeches President Bush gave on Iraq in 2003 or read the Congressional authorization on the war, every rationale that has ever been discussed is there. Bringing reform and democracy to the Arab world was perceived by many, if not most of the war’s early supporters, as the most important goal.
It’s hard to know what to make of an article that persistently retails fables as facts, or of a reporter who writes about President Bush “revising his explanation for why the U.S. is in Iraq” without, apparently, having bothered to read Congress’s Authorization for the Use of Military Force. But maybe it’s not worth commenting on what is in reality a campaign ad for the Democratic Party.
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“We are in a state of civil war, orchestrated by radical Islamists,”
Talking about Iraq? Nope, France.
http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligence/view.php?StoryID=20061013-083614-1432r
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Even if Germany was never turned into New England after 60 years of occupation, FDR still didn’t make us any safer than when we began WWII?
quod erat ignoramus
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I’m not for the war, and I don’t think Robert Phansalkar’s column is necessarily for it either. But neither of those matter because we are in a war whether we agree with it or not.
This column, to me, seems like it’s a critique of Americans’ short attention span and lack of understanding of the world environment as it relates to democracry. This is regardless of whether we went to war under false premises, if we were flat-out lied to or if there had indeed been WMDs. In any case, many people seem to think there must be an easy way out, a way to pull out the troops a way to get ourselves out of this “mess.” Why? Because we’re BORED. I think we would be just as disenchanted with the war whether there had been stockpile upon stockpile of WMD. We’re self-centered, sick and tired of hearing about the war and we want a quick fix, an Rx, a miracle cure to Iraq. We thought this was going to be easy, but the truth is, it isn’t. Should Bush have portrayed it as Mission Accomplished or an easy mission? Probably not. But can we really blame him? He comes from the same nation of people who only want to bring freedom to an oppressed people if it’s easy and quick and won’t really affect us. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work like that - it’s a war.
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There is no mention of spreading democracy or reform in the Congressional Authorization for war.
The only authorization listed is that the President determined that the to be attackee had something to do with 9/11.
Section 2, A SJ RES 23 2001
IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.